


The Bear Population of the Southern California Area (We’ll Laugh About This When We’re Older)

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Saturnalia 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Saturnalia 2011 for the prompt "Sheldon/Penny, optional Amy and/or Bernadette, AU. Penny is a comedian, Sheldon is a reclusive science fiction writer. Hijinks ensue!" I hope the jinks are sufficiently high.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bear Population of the Southern California Area (We’ll Laugh About This When We’re Older)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> Big Bang Theory characters do not belong to me and I am making no profit from this work of fan fiction.
> 
> Many thanks to halfeatenmoon and concupiscence66 for their beta work; if anything still sucks, that's entirely my fault.
> 
> * * *

“...thing about kids these days is that of course they can’t move all that fast with their pants round their damn ankles.” Penny pauses, checks the audience. She’s got them, all right. “Didn’t stop me from telling him—”

“—get off my damn lawn!” they chorus with her. Oh _yeah_. She may only be a couple of years older than the people she’s making fun of, but the way the audience reacts, they know she’s telling the truth. And they love it; they love her cynicism and her snark.

“Thanks for your support tonight, everyone. Leslie’s gonna run some karaoke for you guys now, so I hope you brought your singing voices. Enjoy the rest of your night.” She sticks the mic back in the stand and walks offstage to a hooting round of applause. Leslie gives her a low five on the way past. Leslie’s combination of biting sarcasm and a cheery smile somehow manages to persuade people up to the stage to sing, whether they’re sober enough to remember signing up or not.

(Bernadette sometimes says that she should have named the place the Sarcasm Suite instead of the Comics’ Center. Penny usually responds with a raspberry; Leslie, with an eye roll.)

Stuart has her glass of wine waiting for her at the bar as usual and pushes it across to her as she slides onto her favorite stool. “You did great out there tonight,” he tells her.

“Yeah, well, the only thing that sells better than sarcasm is sex.” She dollops healthy amounts of the latter into her routine as well, feigning amazement at the things young people get up to these days. (Sometimes she doesn’t have to fake anything, especially not when it involves fursuits.) Penny is the most crotchety old twenty-five-year-old around, and the audience loves it.

“That guy’s back again.” Stuart jerks a thumb toward the end of the bar, where a tall man sits nursing what looks like a Coke. Penny knows it’s a Cuba Libre only because she’s heard him order before. There’s a twang in his voice that says part of him never left Texas. “I don’t know why he comes here. He always looks so disapproving, and he hardly ever laughs.”

“Hardly ever... I’m gonna go talk to him.”

“Are you sure that’s...” Stuart’s voice trails off as Penny hops down from her bar stool, glass in hand, and walks purposefully toward the end of the bar. “Of course you’re sure, you’re always sure.”

Penny leans against the bar beside the stranger, who glances at her, looking mildly surprised. Even with him sitting down and her standing, in one of her favorite pairs of wedge-heeled sandals, he’s still taller than her. It’s the first thing that she notices. The second thing is that he has absolutely riveting blue eyes. The third thing is that, despite having an iPad in front of him that he’s typing away on, there’s a tattoo of an old quill pen on the back of his right hand; the tip of it starts on his index finger and the feather curls right up over his wrist.

“I heard you don’t think I’m funny,” she says without preamble.

Those baby blues widen. “Whatever gave you that impression?”

“You’re sitting here staring at your computer thing instead of looking at the stage, to start with.”

“I don’t like karaoke.”

Penny snorts. “Sweetie, nobody likes karaoke. They just get drunk and think they do.” That raises a hint of a smile from him, a faint curve of the lips, and damn it, the man has dimples. “Also, Stuart says you weren’t laughing.”

“Don’t drag me into this!” Stuart calls.

“I’m sure not everyone here laughs.” One graceful hand lifts from the iPad and gestures around the room at large. The quill flutters. “Some of them are here for the singing and some are here just to drink.”

“It’s a pretty specialized place to come to just to drink, don’t you think?” Penny asks, trying to pretend that the insinuation that people don’t come here just to see her doesn’t sting.

“People will go anywhere just to drink as long as other people are there.” He drains his glass, leaving just the ice rattling in the bottom. “It’s a fundamental part of the human condition: _homo sapiens_ are social beings. It’s why people like that young lady currently butchering ‘New York, New York’, inebriated as she may be, are less likely to have problems with alcohol than those who drink alone. She has the support, shaky as it may be, of her friends.”

Penny gives him a sharp look over the top of her wine glass. “How come you’re being so defensive about a little drinking?”

He shrugs and nods at Stuart, pushing his empty glass a little toward the bartender. “A lot of people assume that writers are all Hemingway, finding their inspiration in the bottom of a bottle.”

“You’re a writer?” Penny asks.

“Whatever gave you that impression?” His smile this time is wider, more genuine and, despite the fact that he’s possibly a more irritating smartass than she is, Penny finds herself smiling back at him.

“Well, if it’d help, I could drink with you, and then you wouldn’t be drinking alone,” she offers.

“I’m not drinking alone. I’m writing alone. Thanks,” he adds as Stuart brings him a fresh drink. “You’re disrupting my concentration.”

“ _I’m_ disrupting your concentration? I’m not the one screeching into the microphone.”

He makes a shoo-fly gesture, this time with his left hand; she notes the lack of a ring without really thinking about it. “Background noise. I don’t really register any of it, but white noise is good for the creative process. It calms my unconscious mind, allowing my conscious mind to focus on the story at hand.”

Penny gives him a skeptical look. “So coming out to a bar is part of the creative process? Are you sure about the Hemingway thing? Should I call you Ernest?”

“I’d prefer it if you used my real name.”

“So what’s your real name?”

“Sheldon,” he says. “Sheldon Cooper.” He gives her a look as though he expects her to recognize the name, which she really, really doesn’t. She’s saved from saying as much by Stuart, who turns away from where he’s wiping down the beer taps, his eyes going wide.

“You’re Sheldon Cooper?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“ _The_ Sheldon Cooper? The Sheldon Cooper who won a Hugo for his first novel? _That_ Sheldon Cooper?”

“Apparently his name is Sheldon Cooper,” Penny says to nobody in particular, draining her glass and watching as Stuart leans way across the bar, trying to see what Sheldon’s writing on the iPad.

* * *

Stuart’s rampant fanboyism aside, it’s kind of interesting talking to Sheldon. They swap tattoo stories (although she doesn’t show him hers, considering it’s on her ass), and he confirms that yes, it hurts like hell to get tattooed over the bone.

“I thought most places won’t tattoo hands,” she says.

“How do you explain all those thugs with LOVE and HATE on their knuckles, then?” His eyebrow arches way up. His whole face is made of fine things: his cheekbones are delicate, his eyelashes dark and to die for, his lips smooth, the lower one begging to be licked.

“Prison,” she replies promptly, and it startles a laugh out of him.

He flinches when she touches her fingertip to the point of the quill and traces its slow curl up over his wrist, and then apologizes when she snatches her hand back. “I’m not used to people... touching me,” he says haltingly, and she wonders whether he tacked the end of the sentence on because _I’m not used to people_ just sounds too lonely.

Without thinking about it, she entwines her fingers with his, and this time he doesn’t flinch. “That’s okay, honey,” she says, “you’ll get used to it. You’re welcome here anytime. You just have to start laughing at my routine.”

His upper lip curls a little. “I hardly think you’re the one who gets to dictate which members of the clientele are and aren’t welcome here.”

“ _Stuart_ ,” Penny appeals.

“He’s Sheldon _Cooper_ ,” Stuart says in a tone of voice that suggests she might as well be trying to kick Captain Kirk out of the bar.

Sheldon’s long fingers tighten against hers and then he lets out a sudden surprised noise and pulls away.

“Hey, what’s—”

“I have to go,” he says abruptly, and he’s up off the bar stool, shoving a battered old brown leather cowboy hat onto his head, and all but running out of the door.

“Huh,” says Penny.

“Good first date,” Stuart offers. “Most of mine leave even faster than that.”

“Oh, shut up.”

* * *

  
She doesn’t see Sheldon again for another ten days. She thinks maybe he’s gone on vacation or something. Stuart scolds her for scaring him off. Then he walks in one night with a woman on his arm and it makes Penny falter mid-sentence, which is not a thing that Penny does.

“Stuart, your boyfriend’s here,” she says to cover up the slip, and Stuart flips her the bird. (He does _so_ much better with women when they’re at a safe distance and he can’t smell their perfume.) Sheldon looks startled at the comment, and the woman with him laughs. She’s wearing Sheldon’s stupid hat, too.

After that she has to get through the rest of her routine without fluffing any more lines; she goes through it a little too fast, and Leslie gives her a weird look as she steps down off the stage.

“What’s up, buttercup?”

“Oh, nothing. Just—”

Leslie catches the direction of Penny’s gaze and whistles. “My God, her legs go all the way up to her chin, don’t they?”

“I can see that,” Penny says a little too snappishly, and Leslie gives her a knowing look.

“I thought you only just started getting cozy with him last week.”

“We’re not _cozy_ , Leslie, we were just _talking_.”

“Whatever, sugartits.” Leslie waves her away. Penny weaves her way through the tables to the bar. Leslie cues up “I Kissed A Girl” and winks quite deliberately at the woman sitting on the bar stool beside Sheldon – and, yes, displaying quite a good deal of leg. Penny tries to ignore this and takes her glass of wine from Stuart.

“Hello, Penny,” Sheldon says, not quite looking at her.

“So _this_ is her?” the woman with him asks. “This is the woman got you so worked up you almost forgot Thanksgiving?” Without missing a beat she turns her attention to Penny. “Shelly’s never forgotten Thanksgiving in all the years he’s been away from home, and then this year I called him the week before to see what time he was gonna be gettin’ into town, and he hadn’t even booked his flight yet. Said he was busy writin’ some new book.” During this spiel Sheldon keeps attempting to interrupt her, but she brushes him off with the same shoo-fly gesture he used on Penny. It’s this gesture, even more than the woman’s words, that bring the point home to Penny: they are siblings, not lovers. “So Mom and I decided to bring Thanksgiving to him instead, and maybe find out what’s got him so distracted.” Her eyes travel appreciatively over Penny’s body. “Can’t say I blame him.”

“Hi, I’m Penny,” Penny says as dryly as possible.

“I’m Missy. Sheldon’s twin sister? I guess he might not have mentioned me. He gets caught up in talkin’ about his books and I think he forgets he even has a family sometimes. Especially when he’s got a new book on the go. It’s so hard to get him to even answer the phone when he’s writin’ something new, let alone get him out of the house.”

“You’ll notice she managed to do it anyway,” Sheldon says. “She didn’t even let me bring my iPad.” Stuart looks scandalized. “But apparently if it’s only one night, it doesn’t count as an obstruction of my career.”

“Honey, you’re just writing, it’s not rocket sc—” Missy cuts herself off right there and awkwardly turns to look at Leslie belting out “Lady Marmalade”. Sheldon’s face has gone an angry red along the hairline and he’s biting his lip. Whatever faux pas Missy has committed, it’s a big one.

“I’ll get you both a drink,” Penny says hastily. “Stuart?”

“Coming right up.” He’s already hovering and eyeing their nearly empty glasses. Penny takes the first sip from her own drink with relish – listening to Missy talk is thirsty work.

“So what’re you plannin’ for Thanksgiving, Penny?” Missy asks, taking a step sideways to let Penny sit on the bar stool beside Sheldon. (Possibly to act as a human shield; Sheldon still looks mad.)

“Oh, nothing much. I thought I’d see if Ben and Jerry’s brought out any new ice cream flavors and watch television if my cable hasn’t been cut off yet.” She doesn’t know where any of that aside from the _nothing much_ comes from. Penny doesn’t usually do self-pity. Sheldon, on her other side, is gazing into his glass in a way that says he’s doing a little self-pitying, or something like that.

“Well, now, you can’t do that, it’s plain ridiculous. There’s plenty of space in the truck for one more, Shelly’s got a spare room, and Momma’s never been unable to fill an empty stomach.” Missy raises her glass of wine in a brief toast as though it’s all been decided.

“Wait – I can’t just go off to – I don’t even know where Sheldon lives!”

“Aw, it’s not that far out of town.” Missy gives her a pleading look.

The _really_ ridiculous thing is, Penny’s considering it. A man she’s (barely) known just over a week, and a woman she’s known for about five minutes, and she’s really considering it. Anything’s got to be better than sitting at home and ignoring the guys across the hall fight over whether or not Raj is going vegetarian again for real or if it’s just to avoid eating Howard’s mother’s turbriskefil. True, they do leave their apartment eventually to join the Wolowitz tribe for the traditional meal, but then Penny has to contend with being surrounded by silence.

“I’m going to end up drugged to the eyeballs in the writer’s back bedroom with my feet chopped off,” she mumbles into her glass.

“I thought the writer was the one who was meant to end up in the back bedroom.”

“Stuart. Not helping.”

Leslie, done with her song, hands the mic off to one of the regulars – Penny _thinks_ his real name is Will or possibly Wesley, but the group he comes in with call him a ton of nicknames – and bounds up to the bar, all curiosity.

“Hi, I’m Leslie,” she says to Missy, sticking out her hand and almost, but not quite, completely ignoring Sheldon and Penny. Penny jabs her in the ribs with a fingernail and Leslie does a great job of pretending it never happened. Sheldon practically glares at her, the good brother defending his sister’s virtue. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”

It’s not a line that should work, like, _ever_ , but Missy’s smile turns up a few hundred watts and is not at all diminished by the chorus of groans from Penny, Sheldon, and Stuart.

* * *

  
Somehow the Thanksgiving invitation gets extended to Leslie as well. Penny is almost, but not completely, totally unsurprised by this turn of events. Leslie says yes without even stopping to consider it, and then Penny just _has_ to agree, because if the Cooper twins turn out to be insane chainsaw killers then at least the two of them might have a better chance than one.

The only one who looks less than thrilled about the idea is Sheldon, but it seems like he doesn’t get a say in it.

Missy drives the truck out of Pasadena the next evening with Leslie sitting up front beside her, relegating Penny and Sheldon to the back seat. Penny feels absurdly like she’s back in high school, driving with her friends, the group of them playing rock-paper-scissors to see who’ll be the designated driver, crowding into someone’s car with wine coolers and joints, turning up the radio, driving around back roads, kicking up the dust.

There’s no dust on the road out to Sheldon’s place, though, despite the fact that they turn off the freeway fairly early and onto a long, winding road.

“If you’ve got a hunting lodge in the forest, you should have told me, I would have brought my orange vest,” Leslie says.

“Nobody’s gonna mistake you for a deer,” Missy says, reaching over from the driver’s seat briefly to pat Leslie’s knee.

It’s not a hunting lodge in the forest, though. It’s on the edge of the forest, the sort of place the villagers who spin rumors about the big bad wolf might live, and while it’s definitely lodge-esque, it’s not the sort of place Penny pictures when she thinks about hunting lodges. The front porch has a Halloween pumpkin on it glowing the Decepticon logo into the falling dusk, for one thing, and a comfortably padded porch swing.

Plus she thinks of loggers and hunters and trappers in thick flannel shirts with overgrown beards as the traditional inhabitants, not petite women in paisley dresses. Sheldon’s mother opens the front door just as they ascend the steps onto the porch, and from behind her comes all the good smells of Thanksgiving: turkey, cornbread, cranberry sauce, and more.

Missy and Leslie take a discreet step apart from each other as they reach the porch. Sheldon’s well ahead of them, wrapping his arms around his mother. The only thing that the scene needs is a dusting of snow and it could be a Christmas card photo.

Sheldon’s mom hugs her daughter and then Leslie – who bears it with surprised good grace – and then pulls Penny into a hug as well. “You must be Penny,” she says warmly. “Shelly’s told us so much about you.”

A surprised “Really?” rises to Penny’s lips, but she bites it off when Sheldon gives her a pleading look over his mother’s head. There _is_ something going on here, but maybe it’s not so Texas Chainsaw Massacre as she originally imagined. She doesn’t have time to ask him about it now, though; Mary Cooper is ushering them into the house and, with its pleasant warmth and delicious smells, Penny thinks even if she gets stuffed into a cage and fattened up for the oven it might well be a better Thanksgiving than listening to Leonard and Raj across the hall screeching at each other about just ordering pizza and telling Howard they’ve both died.

Being inside the house is like being inside a hunting lodge where all the animal trophies have been replaced by _Star Trek_ memorabilia. She knows more than she’d like to about _Star Trek_ thanks to nine months of dating Stuart, but it’s not a vast array of figurines and DVDs; rather, there’s a neatly framed and signed uniform shirt on one wall, an autographed lithograph of the original series cast on another, and so on. The main living room is walled with bookshelves; Penny recognizes a lot of the titles from Stuart and from the guys across the hall, but there are also a lot of thick textbooks and reference manuals that look as though Sheldon’s plundered a university library.

The house just goes on and on. There’s a hall from the living area into a spacious open-plan kitchen and dining area, and another hallway back to the bedrooms (of which more than one is spare, although Missy generously offers to share with Leslie so that Mary and Penny can each have a room to themselves). Two bathrooms, a laundry room with sparkly white washer and dryer; it all looks like a display home. The study door is closed and she only knows it’s the study door because they’ve seen every other room and he simply has to have a room especially for writing.

She’s pretty sure most writers couldn’t afford this unless they were Stephen King or someone. She knows (having Googled it) that the Hugo Awards are a pretty big deal to science fiction writers, but does that really translate into the dollar value she’s looking at here?

Maybe she’ll be nosier about it later. For now, there’s turkey.

* * *

  
Sheldon corners her in the bathroom when she goes to wash her hands for dinner. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he says.

“You’re a secret millionaire?” Penny guesses, picking up the soap.

“Apart from that.” He looks distinctly uncomfortable. “I may have told my mother that you and I are dating.”

The soap squirts out between Penny’s fingers into the sink. “You _what_?”

“She constantly asks me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down. I’ve told her time and time again that I’ve no need of a romantic partner, but she’s adamant that I do. I mentioned on my weekly phone call to her that I’d been speaking to you at the Comics’ Center and that we’d had a drink together and I found you tolerable to talk—”

“Tolerable!”

“—to, and she asked if I intended to see you again. I told her I did and she assumed thereafter that we were dating.”

“...and you didn’t bother to correct her.” Penny gives up on the soap and sticks her hands under the tap.

Sheldon passes her a hand-towel. “I didn’t expect her to come up here and meet you, for one thing.”

“Couldn’t you just have had a Canadian Internet girlfriend like every other geek out there?” (Also the subject of much discussion in the apartment across from hers.)

“You did _meet_ my mother out there. She’s not the type to be dissuaded by placatory stories. If I’d said you were from Quebec she’d be on a plane there and practicing her French.”

“Sheldon...”

He gives her a look that speaks of barely held patience. “Penny. I will buy your drinks for the next month if you play along with this. You’re a comedian and excellent at rolling with the punches. I’ve no doubt you can manage it.”

“Fine.” Penny tosses the hand-towel onto the vanity. Sheldon immediately picks it up and starts folding it. “Just one other thing, though.”

“Yes?”

“Why me?”

Sheldon smiles, a little. It’s like watching the first rays of sunlight peek out on a cloudy morning. “Because you didn’t know who I was in the bar. You treated me like a person instead of a celebrity.”

“What’s wrong with being treated like a celebrity?” Penny asks, thinking of her own unlaunched acting career, the slow crawl from wisecracking waitress to sharp-tongued comedian.

“Believe it or not, it gets annoying,” Sheldon says, carefully threading the hand-towel back onto its loop. She accidentally brushes it on her way out of the bathroom, sending it slithering to the tiles, and hears him groan.

* * *

  
“So, Penny, what’s your favorite of Shelly’s books?” Mary asks as they’re lazily working their way through the tail end of dinner. Penny has a mouthful of buttered roll and gravy and has to swallow before she can speak, which sets her coughing.

“She hasn’t read them, Mom,” Sheldon says as Leslie hands Penny a glass of water.

“Well, why not? I thought everyone in the world had. _I_ did.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Even though sometimes I wonder whether you really believe it’s science _fiction_.”

“Yes, Mom.” Sheldon looks both irritated and benign, as though this is an argument they’ve back-and-forthed many times before.

“Because you’re terribly invested in all that rocket science stuff.”

At this Leslie looks startled and drops her fork. Sheldon looks at her, eyes narrowing, but says nothing either to her or to his mother. Leslie picks up her fork and attacks her corn. Mary, on the other hand, picks up on the look between them and gives them both an odd look of her own.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“This turkey is amazing, Mrs Cooper,” Penny announces, hoping to stave off any impending explosion. “What’s your secret?”

Mary beams at her. “Bacon grease, hon. Rub it into the skin. It makes it good and crisp. I use it in most everything I cook.”

Leslie looks down at her plate, horrified. “Not the _vegetables_?”

“Well, the roast potatoes...”

Leslie’s up out of her chair in seconds, bolting for the bathroom.

“What the heck?” Missy asks.

“She’s vegetarian,” Penny says.

“Oh, that poor child,” Mary says, scraping her chair back on the hardwood floor and going after Leslie. Penny looks at the smear of bacon grease on Leslie’s plate and then looks up just in time to catch a definite smirk on Sheldon’s face.

“Sheldon, what the hell?”

He looks startled and raises his napkin to his mouth as if to wipe the expression away. “Nothing. I – nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing, Sheldon Lee. I saw that smile. It ain’t polite to smile at other people’s troubles.” Missy gives Sheldon a stern look. “Especially not when you know your sister’s got designs on that other person.”

“Oh, do you? I couldn’t tell, considering how much you were ogling her across the table,” Sheldon says dryly.

“Do you think Mom noticed?”

“Of course she did, she’s not blind! Maybe a little selectively deaf, but not blind.”

“Stop trying to change the subject!” Penny’s not sure which of them she’s directing it to, but both of them jump and give her a guilty look. “Sheldon, what’s with the schadenfreude?”

“It’s hardly schadenfreude. It’s perfectly justified. She started it!” The three responses tumble out of his mouth.

Penny and Missy practice their entry for the Synchronized Eyebrow Raising Olympics.

“We used to work together at Caltech. Due to several... differences of opinion, both of us were let go.”

“Oh, heck, she’s _that_ Leslie?” Missy asks.

“Yes, _that_ Leslie. The one who always derailed every civil conversation that we tried to have into a ridiculous argument.”

“I was what now?” Leslie stands in the doorway, arms folded. “ _You_ were the one who kept telling me I needed to get out of the laboratory and back into the kitchen.”

“You were consistently demonstrating a complete lack of respect for scientific traditions—”

“Like being a misogynistic jerkwad?”

“Shelly, did you say that to her?”

“Mom, she was being mean to me!”

“That doesn’t excuse sexism!” Missy joins in on the snapping and that’s what sets Sheldon off. He pushes back from the table and stomps toward the kitchen.

“Well, if I’m too sexist for you, maybe I’ll just let you enjoy the hospitality of my home _without_ me,” he informs them all before he vanishes and a loud slam announces that he’s gone out the back door.

Penny looks at Leslie. Leslie looks at Mary. Mary looks at Missy. Missy looks briefly at the back door and then at Leslie. Leslie makes an urking noise and dashes back toward the bathroom. Mary starts for the back door.

“Where are you going?” Missy asks.

“I’m going to talk him back in here.”

“No, don’t.” Penny gets up, already wondering whether the mosquitoes will eat her alive. “I’ll go.” There’s a flashlight in the kitchen, right there on the shelf beside the back door; she grabs it and flicks it on. “He won’t have gone far, will he?”

“Maybe,” Mary says. “He hasn’t has a lot of time.”

“Right. I’ll be back soon.” Penny lets the screen door swing shut behind her and starts across Sheldon’s back lawn. Naturally he’s charged off into the forest to sulk rather than going somewhere nice, like the porch swing out front. It could be a reclusive writer thing, but based on experience with her brother Penny’s pretty sure it’s more of a guy thing. He’s got one advantage that she doesn’t – the entire Angeles National Forest – but she has a flashlight and she can hear him crashing around out there.

Either that or it’s a bear, but she’s pretty sure California doesn’t usually have bears this close to civilization.

She hopes.

* * *

Despite the fairly easy to track sounds of Sheldon crunching through the underbrush, Penny takes a while to catch up with him, mostly because he knows the area and she doesn’t. Also because she can’t help but slow down and smell the night. The forest smells clean and good and, although they’re close enough to town that she could see the lights if she shinnied up one of the trees, it’s like being a thousand miles away from the pollution and smog of the real world.

Real pine is infinitely better than those fake air freshener things.

When he stops moving, she suddenly has trouble figuring out where he is. She stops moving as well and the clear-smelling air is clear-sounding as well. There are crickets – there are always crickets – and an owl, and dozens of tiny rustling noises and then, off to her left, the snapping of a branch between frustrated fingers.

(Either that or it’s a particularly dexterous bear.)

She heads that way, flashlight dancing over trees and ground and the darkness between them, and finally over a sulky science fiction novelist who’s sitting on a log with his iPad out.

“Hey, Shelly.”

“Only my mother and sister call me that.” He refuses to look up at her.

She sits down beside him. “Did you really tell Leslie to get back in the kitchen? That’s kind of a dick comment.”

Sheldon gives her a weary look. “Everyone says things in the heat of the moment that they don’t mean.”

“Right. I kind of got the impression that you did mean it.”

He shrugs uncomfortably. “She did bring food into the lab and cook it a lot. I may have made the mental association—”

“Oh, bullshit,” Penny says. “Just because she made porridge over a Bunsen burner a few times doesn’t mean you get to make sexist comments like that.”

Sheldon’s choice of response to this is, “How did you know she made porridge over a Bunsen burner?”

“I didn’t know for sure, but one of the guys who lives in the apartment across from me used to date Leslie and he said when they pulled all-nighters at the lab, that’s what she used to do in the morning.”

“All-nighters at the – who is this neighbor of yours?”

“His name’s Leonard, he—” But Sheldon cuts her off with a groan, dropping his face into his hands.

“This world is too small,” he informs her through his palms.

* * *

Five minutes later they’ve moved on from Leslie and Leonard – mostly – and are talking about how Sheldon became a writer.

“I had a lot of free time after leaving the university, and when I have a lot of free time I get a little edgy,” he confides in her, his hands working restlessly between his knees. The quill is a curling shadow against his skin. “I originally came up here to try to change my perspective on things a little so that I could focus on work instead of on the infinite distractions of everyday life. I brought my whiteboards and my textbooks, and then when I unpacked everything I realized that I didn’t _want_ to work. I wanted to write.”

“Did you want to write before you got into being a scientist?” Penny asks, swatting a mosquito.

“I’d always wanted to write.” He chuffs an odd little laugh. “I think a lot of people say that whether they get published or not. But once I sat down and started writing I was determined to get it all right. I was so used to being good at everything that it never occurred to me that I could be bad at anything.”

“But Stuart said your first novel won a Hugo. That’s a big deal, right?”

“But that wasn’t the first thing I sat down and wrote.”

“So what was it?”

“Penny, I really don’t think about those days any more. Surely you try to repress your memories of the days before your success.”

Penny thinks about it for a minute. “I started out by telling a few jokes to people when I was serving their food at the Cheesecake Factory,” she says eventually. “They laughed. I think every time someone laughed was another reason for me to keep working on what I was doing.”

“But you didn’t give up your day job,” Sheldon says, and it takes her a second to realize that he’s not joking.

“Well, no. I mean, you didn’t just drop everything to write, did you?”

“I still had the capability to act as a researcher in a freelance capacity,” he says, which she figures means no.

“So what _was_ the first thing you sat down and wrote?”

“Penny. I hardly think that’s relevant to the story.” And he gives her one of those condescending head-tilted looks that seem so irritatingly familiar despite the fact that she’s only known him a little over a week.

She’s about to hit him with a snappy comeback to that (like about how it’s _totally_ relevant), when suddenly the flashlight goes out. Penny shakes it, and twists it, and thumps it against the log.

“Shit,” she mutters.

“I got out here without the benefit of a flashlight; I’m sure we can get back—”

Something crashes in the forest behind them, and the two of them, in a moment they later swear they will never, ever share with anyone else in their lives, instinctively grab each other and shriek, “ _Mom!_ ”

* * *

 

“Sheldon.”

“Yes, Penny.”

“In all your time as a writer, did you ever happen to do any research on, oh, the bear population of the Southern California area?”

“Not specifically, no, but I’m reasonably certain they don’t usually come this close to people’s houses.”

“What about if they smelled food?”

“Penny. We’re talking about actual bears here, not Yogi and Boo-Boo.”

“But actual bears go after food too, right?”

“Can you smell any food?”

“No. Just your cologne. What do you use? It’s nice.”

“It doesn’t matter. Oh, and Penny?”

“Yes?”

“Could you get your forehead off my collarbone, please? You have a very solid skull.”

* * *

“Sheldon.”

“What now, Penny?”

“Can you boost me up to that branch? Maybe if I can get up the tree I can see which way your house is.”

“I find that highly unlikely.”

“Come on, you’re the fiction writer, don’t things like this happen in books all the time?”

“...only under implausible circumstances.”

“Well, truth is stranger than fiction. Ha.”

“If that’s the level of your sense of humor, I’m not surprised you have to resort to telling off strangers for not paying attention at your comedy shows.”

“Don’t make me kick you in the face while I’m up here.”

“...Penny?”

“ _What_?”

“Can you see anything?”

“No. Just trees. Damn it.”

“Be careful. That branch you’re about to put your foot on looks – _Penny_!”

“...ow.”

“Are you all right?”

“For someone who’s lost in the forest and just fell three feet out of a tree and landed on her butt? Peachy. Can we go home now?”

* * *

“Sheldon.”

“Penny.”

“You never did tell me what the first thing you started out writing was.”

“And I never will.”

(He will. One day. She vows it on her sore butt and scraped hands.)

“I told _you_ how I got my start in comedy.”

“I didn’t sign any reciprocity agreement.”

“If you write the way you talk, I’m surprised anyone can lift the books to read them.”

“If you tell jokes the way you – ow! Ow, Penny, your fingernails are sharp!”

* * *

After she digs him in the ribs for whatever it was he was about to say about her sense of humor, Penny lets her hand relax and slide around Sheldon’s waist and, surprisingly, he doesn’t push her away. Instead he puts his arm around her shoulders, and doesn’t remark about her skull when she leans her head against his upper arm.

It feels good to be here with him, even if they are out in the middle of nowhere and it’s dark and some kind of bug is definitely biting her ankle. Oh, and her butt hurts from falling out of the tree, to say nothing of her grazed hands. He is comforting, warm and solid in the dark. She picks up the flashlight again, tips the batteries into her lap, and touches each with her tongue, attempting to check if they’re charged.

“That won’t work. You need to complete the circuit. Also, you look ridiculous.”

Penny keeps her tongue out long enough for him to know it’s directed at him, and then drops the batteries back into the case, trying the switch one more time. The filament glows for a second and then there’s a businesslike _pop_ from the bulb.

“Shit.”

“That’s strange. I don’t use that flashlight very often. Although there was that night I had to startle the raccoons.”

“You had to startle the raccoons.”

“They were trying to get into the trash.”

“So you definitely have raccoons and maybe have bears. Jeez, Sheldon, could you have chosen anywhere more idyllic to use as a writer’s retreat?”

“Well, Australia has a lot of spiders and snakes.”

She can’t quite see his expression in the darkness, but she does believe that he’s smiling.

“Maybe we should just try walking out of here,” she suggests, although she’s disinclined to so much as stand up now that she’s snuggled in against him, regardless of whatever it is biting her ankle. He’s thin but not in a bony way; she could stay here for quite some time.

“We could. Of course, if we happened to go in the wrong direction, we might end up irretrievably lost in the middle of the forest.”

“Or worse, Altadena.”

They elect to stay put, at least for the time being.

* * *

“You’d think maybe they would have come to look for us by now.”

“You took the only flashlight. Not to mention that Mom’s probably serving dessert, and I know _I_ wouldn’t leave the house while there was fresh pecan pie in it.”

* * *

(Mary stands on the back porch, listening to the night, sneaking a quick cigarette. Part of her wants to go looking for them; a bigger part, the part that agrees with her daughter, wants them to figure it out on their own.

Besides, if they’re really in distress, one of them will just shriek again. She can’t keep from smiling at the thought; darned if they didn’t sound exactly like a pair of kids having a nightmare.)

* * *

“Sheldon.”

He stirs beside her, stretching his legs out. “What is it now, Penny?”

“Did you really mean what you said earlier about not needing a romantic partner?”

She’s close enough that she can see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. “I’ve never felt the need for one before.” She can hear how carefully he’s choosing his words, too.

“Before what?”

“Despite your need for incessant conversation, your company is not entirely intolerable.”

“Two weeks ago we hadn’t even met each other. Then your sister invites me over for Thanksgiving five minutes after meeting me. Then we get lost in the woods. I feel like I’m in a romantic comedy.”

“I’m not familiar with the genre,” Sheldon says stiffly.

Penny sighs, and touches his cheek with her hand, and kisses him when he turns his head to her.

He doesn’t kiss her back. Not at first. But then his mouth softens and opens to hers, and he makes a very interested noise when she runs her tongue over his lower lip, and he tastes like cranberry sauce. The arm around her shoulders moves so he can run his fingers through her hair and he lets it fall softly against her neck, making her shiver.

“This is far more enjoyable with you than it was with Leslie,” he informs her when they pull apart.

“ _What_.”

She feels more than hears his laughter. “I thought I’d make an attempt at humor, since you made the remark about romantic comedies.”

“ _Sheldon_! You—”

He captures her protesting mouth with his and Penny forgets what she was about to yell at him for. He might not think that he needs a “romantic partner”, but Penny is quite sure that it would be eminently unreasonable to expect the world to do without someone who is so good with his mouth and hands. He touches her at first like he’s testing out a new story idea, making the first few notes, an outline, a bare-bones sketch of her neck and arms and the line of her collarbone. Then, confidence growing, he starts building upon that, fleshing out those first touches with slow strokes over her skin, and if he’s half this attentive to his writing she’s kinda envious of his iPad right now.

(This is the best she can come up with? She’s lucky she has a good excuse and that that excuse has his mouth against the side of her neck, because otherwise she’d be booed off stage with a line like that.)

She is his work in progress and she can’t wait to see where the story is going to go.

Sheldon abruptly lifts his mouth from her throat. “Pecan pie,” he says, and Penny considers bopping him one with the flashlight.

“Sheldon, I know it’s Thanksgiving, but—”

“I can smell it,” he interrupts her, standing up – a tall, dark, and handsome shadow – and offering his hand to her. “If we hurry before the smell spreads too much, we’ll be able to get back to the house.”

Penny disdains his hand and gets up, rather miffed. “Weren’t you enjoying yourself?”

“I was,” says Sheldon, “but I can think of more comfortable places to enjoy myself than in the middle of a forest.”

It’s dark, but she can see the slow knowing smile on his face, and she hopes that the heat between her legs won’t remain an unfinished draft forever.

(She is totally going to fire her mental script writer.)

* * *

 

He gets quieter and more withdrawn as they walk about three feet apart to avoid falling over each other as well as the unseen hazards of the night forest. Finally Penny grabs his arm just as the house lights come into view between the trees.

“What is wrong with you?” she hisses.

“I just don’t want to admit to my mother and sister that they were right.”

“About what?”

By way of answer, he kisses her again, and if he keeps doing that she’s liable to just climb him like one of the trees surrounding them (although hopefully without any more falling involved).

“Oh. Well, we don’t need to say anything just yet,” Penny says, diplomatically waiting until he is well and truly finished. (The feeling of his tongue sliding against hers makes her incapable of speech, anyway.)

“We should at least be circumspect about the degree of seriousness of the relationship.”

Penny nods, confident that he’ll see it even in the dark. They both have night eyes now.

“Sounds fair to me, considering I wasn’t even the one who told them we were in this relationship in the first place,” she says, grinning at him.

“Penny, that’s not fair.”

“All’s fair in love and unexpected Thanksgiving dinners.” She steps out of the circle of his arms and turns toward the house again. “Come on. I’m getting eaten alive out here.”

As they cross the back lawn toward the warm, welcoming light streaming from the back door and Mary waiting in the doorway, she takes his hand in hers, despite what they just discussed. Maybe this’ll give her a chance to be an actress after all.

But considering the way his fingers curl back around hers? She’s not entirely sure she’ll have to act.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Flames Went Higher](https://archiveofourown.org/works/312502) by [Lauren (notalwaysweak)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren)




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